"Last week, I told you about my NAS purchase, and my desire to explore desktop applications for backing up your Ubuntu computer. From the administrative interface of my Buffalo NAS, I created a network share that I could access with the different systems in my office. It's an SMB share so that it can also be accessed from Windows if needs arise. I then permanently mount those shares as network file systems (though not NFS) on my Kubuntu Karmic system. This I do from the command line
In general terms, DeltaCopy is an open source, fast incremental backup program. Let's say you have to backup one file that is 500 MB every night. A normal file copy would copy the entire file even if a few bytes have changed. DeltaCopy, on the other hand, would only copy the part of file that has actually been modified. This reduces the data transfer to just a small fraction of 500 MB saving time and network bandwidth. In technical terms, DeltaCopy is a "Windows Friendly" wrapper around the Rsync program, currently maintained by Wayne Davison. "rsync" is primarily designed for Unix/Linux/BSD systems. Although ports are available for Windows, they typically require downloading Cygwin libraries and manual configuration.